SGI 10,000 core concept

In a bold move, Silicon Graphics has decided to see how much crap many cores they can shove in one box. The Molecule is 10,000 core rackmount machine designed to leverage low cost consumer CPUs like the Intel Atom. It emphasizes high memory bandwidth and throughput between CPUs. While this sort of space efficiency is interesting it’s certainly going to take some serious cooling to get designs like this off the ground.

i’m sure that some point in the future, fabrication will become cheap enough that you’ll be able to replace that little portable electric fan heater’s element with an array of custom processors, busily computing folding@home calculations in order to provide you with warmth…

I can macgyver a 100% efficiency heater with nothing but a clothespin a cup of warm piss, nemo, but the molecule would be slightly less than 100% efficient because of losses in the electromagnetic spectrum. I think SG is counting on the number-crunching power to make it worth the investment.

Also, that’s clever name they’re using, I hope they stick with that processor.

Too bad the linked article says it doesn’t actually exist, probably owing heavily to the heating problems. Then again, look, I just drew up a 20,000 core system using Q6600s and heavily drawing on 5th dimension! It’s about as relevant as this

wow, i myself would have settled for, i don’t know 10 cores for my computer. imagine the electric bill for running this thing, and the cost for refrigeration of the room it is housed in, and just the cost of the damn thing. it is beautiful in its raw processing power. maybe they built it for vista, lol , just kidding. i think only custom Linux could manage that behemoth.

yeah unfortunately, the atom is like a mouse. it clocks in at the fastest at 1.8GHZ. the whole concept is like having 10,000 mice pull a semi truck, yeah it could work…. but there is probably a better way to do it. but really it would take 3 atom processors to match my one athlonx2. even the old Pentium 4 beats the atom. but the atom did achieve one goal of the project, its cheap, real cheap.. $45 per processor. but at a guessed cost of 45,000 that defeats the purpose of cheap.